A long sampler to start off Summer

Well I'm trying to get back into the swing of things and today I do have a Sampler for Sunday. Several people commented how long the Willie's Quaker Sampler is that I've been stitching but it is a short one compared to this piece. This sampler is almost 6 feet long.....

and it is only about 6" tall. (You can click on the picture and make it bigger.) Each letter was a separate little leaflet and I can't for the life of me remember who the designer was - Lizzie Kate or Heart in Hand or Bent Creek - I'm drawing a total blank and the charts are long gone. (Stasi if you remember who designed these please let me know!)

Anyway I think most people just stitched one or two of these or if they did them as a group it was so many rows and so many columns. I don't know what possessed me to stitch them as one long row, but once the idea was in my head it would not leave! At the time I got all my cross stitch goodies at Twisted Threads in Madeira, a suburb of Cincinnati, and they ordered the linen for me. They charged by the square inch and I don't remember what I paid but I was impressed that I could get a continuous piece of linen. Each chart was sold separately and I remember going to a couple of shops before I could collect all of them. This was pre-internet shopping so the hunt was all done by car. This piece hangs in my breakfast nook way up high where I can see if from the table.

I took these pictures standing on a chair and I have cropped them but some of the angles are skewed but I didn't want to take it down as it was a bear to hang and get straight.

Here we have A-apple, B-bee, C-cow, and D-daffodil...

Okay I repeated the D so ignore it, E-evergreen, F-fish, G-goose...

H-house & heart, I-ice skate, J-jingle bells, K-key...

L-lamb, M-mitten ,N-nest, O-owl ,P-pineapple...

Q-quilt block ,R-robin, S-strawberry, T-teacup, U-unicorn...

V-violet, W-weathervane, X- xylophone, Y- yolk, and Z-zebra.

Now the way I stitched this was I started with the letter Z and worked my way to A. I stitch starting at the upper left side of charts and work to the right. I don't use a hoop and just hold the linen in my hands and this way I'm not squishing up work I've stitched, just the linen I haven't gotten to yet. Does that make sense? Anyway it works for me. With this piece I rolled the finished parts up and put a safety pin at the top and bottom to keep it out of the way.

So you can see that my love of the BAP - big a$$ project- has a long and storied past. Among my UFO are several other BAPs including the Houses of Hawk Run Hallow, And they Sinned, BBD Anniversaries of the Heart, and all the Prairie Schooler letters done on one piece of linen. My son thinks I'm enamored with large samplers and large quilts is to compensate for my being short. I think he took too many psychology courses in college.

Okay, I'm off to stitch some more on the Monastarium piece. I'm still operating under the delusion that I can finish it by the 16th. Stay tuned..

Happy stitching-
carol fun